reference cursor ...

Oracle 8 supports reference cursors using which a stored procedure can for example return a cursor pointer. In other words a client has access to the cursor pointer using which he can fetch rows one by one as long as he pleases or there are rows to return.

But is this the only way to return a result set back to the client. The biggest limitation of ref cursor is it is attanched to a database table! Is it possible to return a REF CURSOR to anything other than a table, for example a Varray?? Is this possible? Most of the time the called stored procedure would do some complex queries, do some data massaging and finally produce a result set. This result set is not attached to or part of any particular table.

One way could be a object pointer returned back which has this resultant set. Are there any other ways?? I believe sybase creates temp tables specifically for this purpose. These tables go away after the user disconnects. This by itself is not a great implementation but what is Oracle's answer to the above problem?

Any thought would be deeply appreciated!

Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/ Received on Fri Dec 15 2000 - 14:30:11 CST